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State official: Mill pipeline might not change St. Johns River much

Building a wastewater pipeline for a Putnam County paper mill might scarcely change the health of the St. Johns River, a state environmental administrator suggested Monday.

“For all intents and purposes, the pipeline exists right now. It’s just made of dirt instead of PVC,” the district director of Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection, Greg Strong, told members of Jacksonville’s mayoral-appointed Environmental Protection Board.

The comment, likening the pipeline to the creek now carrying wastewater to the St. Johns from Georgia-Pacific’s mill near Palatka, continued a series of talks to the board where Strong has avoided directly predicting his agency’s decision on whether to approve the pipeline.

“We are not at the point of making the decision now,” he said. He added that might change “in a couple of months’ time.”

The pipeline, proposed in the early 1990s because wastewater released into smaller Rice Creek makes the creek fail state water standards, has been a big issue for many environmental advocates. Critics see the proposal as allowing a company to gloss over a water pollution problem by diluting its waste in a bigger waterway.

Water entering the St. Johns from the creek eventually flows through Jacksonville on its way to the ocean. A state-ordered report that Georgia-Pacific financed said water in the creek was too dark and salty to meet state standards and that chronic exposure was harmful to one species that was tested, a water flea.

Speaking before Strong did, St. Johns Riverkeeper Neil Armingeon told the board his group would rather see the state waive some water standards in the creek — an option the state seldom uses — than see the pipeline move wastewater straight into the river.

When board member Terrell Shaw asked whether Georgia-Pacific would be interested in such an exception, plant spokesman Jeremy Alexander declined to answer, saying no specific alternatives had been suggested.

Armingeon said the creek absorbs some effects of the wastewater, benefiting the St. Johns.

And he told board members Georgia-Pacific hasn’t fully addressed questions about cancer-causing dioxin found in water tests from Rice Creek.

“What it says is there’s some source of dioxin, [and] its not clearly understood yet, but the concentration of dioxin is such that we shouldn’t worry about it. We don’t buy that,” Armingeon said.

He said he believed research and scientific progress could eventually let the company meet state standards with no pipeline.

But Alexander said his company wants to be certain it’s meeting environmental laws.

“The key word I hear from the critics is 'potentially.’ Potentially complying with the law doesn’t get it done,” Alexander said. “Potentially just doesn’t cut it.”

The fact that most of two decades has passed since the pipeline was proposed complicates the choices being made now, board Chairman Gary Bowers said.

“The pipeline may have been the best technology in 1993,” Bowers said. “But is it still the best technology in, almost, 2011?”